I remember being shocked the first time I called my room in halls at University “home”. It was the first time I had called any where other than my childhood home, “home”, the home I had lived in since I was five, and it felt significant. It didn’t take more than a couple of months, but I felt that the place I came back to every day after hanging out in the studio, to make dinner and chat with my flatmates, was home.
I thought then about what it meant to make a home. Why did that feeling come so easily when it was such a drastic change? I thought initially it was because my things were there. I had stripped out my childhood bedroom ready for the next sibling, taking everything that was important to me. I had everything from my favourite duvet cover, to a random candle my best friend had given to me years before, that I never dared light but somehow could not bear to part with, either. It made sense that the room would feel like home, when it looked very much the same as I climbed into bed each night, but I don’t think that it felt homely because of my things.
What I had in that first year and the years after at Uni was community. It was funny, I guess, the way we kind of were put together in halls and stranger still perhaps that we may remain friends now with only a common subject studied, or even more loosely, from a similar part of the country. What we had in our flat and in our very large group of those who studied Graphic Design (102 people in that class, would you believe) was community, but I don’t think I saw the importance of that until recently.
Home became a name I gave to many places over the years. I never stayed in the same place for more than a couple of years, three at a push. Even in the part of London where I was regularly followed to my door and was once harassed in the local Tesco, where I lived in what I can only now call a troubled relationship, even there I made that awful mouse-infested overcrowded house a home.
Home was wherever I could afford, wherever there was a room available and where my friends were, even if they hadn’t started out as such, they always became good friends.
Friends were my community, even if it was often confined to our part of the house. But this home, where we are now, is the longest I have ever lived in one place since my childhood home, so why is it only starting to feel like home now after 4 and a half years?
I struggled at first to feel at home here, in the house I bought with my partner and where we have settled to raise our two children. It was a random place on the border of Kent that we picked based on its journey time into London – a decision before 2020 that felt of the upmost importance. It seemed nice, they apparently have nice schools, the area seems safe - on paper, perhaps, it all seemed like a very good decision.
I was confident we made a good choice on the area, but as our children have grown the house that I fell in love with for its gorgeously wide windows, and modernist aesthetic, has revealed itself to be impractical in many ways. Whenever I mention to people that we don’t have our own garden, or that our house sits on top of garages and can only be accessed by stairs, they audibly sigh as if they can imagine my daily struggles with my two children.
Our house is a pain, but I haven’t fallen out of love with it, and still pinch myself daily that it is ours. (Let’s not talk about the lease.)
I have long called it home, but I am not sure it has felt like home for long.
The house feels like home and the estate we are in, but in amongst the town I have always felt a little alien. I blame the pandemic, and all the restrictions that were in place, for the fact that I spent most of my first maternity leave, the time I had imagined I would meet my forever-mum-friends, stuck inside my own home unable to go anywhere. The effects of COVID lasted long into the following years as I went back to work and mostly worked from home. My world, which had once included train journeys into Central London, was now confined to the journey from my desk in the living room to the entrance of the nursery setting we had chosen based on its proximity to the house. My world was too small for me to call the town I live in home, I didn’t know it well enough.
Our little pocket of Kent/London has only started to feel like home in the last year and I know exactly why. It is because I finally have found community.
It was only when I started to become confident with my second baby that I dared venture to mum and toddler groups with the two of my children, but it is the best thing I could have done. On a good week we’ll go to three, with sometimes one extra with just my second child and it is crazy how many people we have met.
I had thought when I started going that the aim of them was to find mum friends, and in that I have probably failed. I have written before that there are many reasons for this not least because these groups are filled with Nans and childminders. I can count on one hand the amount of people in a similar situation as me who I have met who I would happily go to the pub with, but I realise now there is more to it than that.
When I am out in town with my kids it is rare for us not to see someone we know. Someone we can wave at and say “See you on Thursday!” We may not know their names, but we know they’ll be there and we will catch up with a cup of tea in hand. I have watched my children blossom into these social beings just as I feared it would never happen – I have seen myself blossom too. I have met so many people and the hours with them have been a lifeline for me on the toughest of weeks.
I value the wisdom and support of the older generation given at these groups. They do so mostly voluntarily and I hope they know that parents like me, who spend most of the week hanging out with two troublesome toddlers are truly grateful for their contribution.
I feel like we are firmly part of the community now. I smile at the certainty of when we walk up to our favourite café after one of the morning groups, to be met once again by the same two older men who will open the door for us, make jokes about being doormen and spend the next half hour poking their tongues out at my kids. I always look forward to seeing the lady at one group who asks me how I am, and how work is going and who likes my Instagram posts in an effort to support me and my design endeavours. My partner and I laugh when we see the same two men in McDonald’s if we go in for breakfast, always sat in the same seats, talking about the price of Egg McMuffins and when the big charity shop is going to open, but I will worry something has happened to them on the weeks they are not there.
Home is in the familiarity of the place, it is important I think to be surrounded by those things that you love, (these days for me, it is books and notebooks), but it is also in the people. The familiar faces that walk through the streets make a place feel like home. I am conscious that these people may well be lost to us when our routine changes in September, but I hope that the school run and the kids’ friends at school will provide a sense of community in their place. Otherwise, I hope that I know where I can find the people I have met and they can ground me into feeling at home again.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed Distracted please do share this post with a friend.
What makes you feel at home?
Do you feel part of your community? What makes you feel that way?
What were your experiences of making a home/moving to a new place?
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Absolutely fascinated by this! I think about home all the time and having recently moved countries to America, am muddy obsessed by it at the moment ( I also have a new book out in May, called The Giant on the Skyline, which is about everything you have written about!). Moving to a country where I really had no roots and knew no one, the importance of community is more pressing than ever. Home is not putting chairs in rooms but the conversations we have with others, the friendships we form. Also I love your house is on the first floor - I lived in a house like this for a long time and loved it so very very much. I still feel sad we had to move from it, in search of more space as my family was growing and I just ran out of bedrooms, but I often imagine moving back there because I loved it so much!
Community is built in for us all the way to adulthood, and suddenly we have to create it from scratch once we’re out in the real world. It’s not easy, especially when we don’t necessarily have shared experiences with folks. Not yet, anyway. Sometimes it takes several tries and versions. Good for you for getting out and about!